capturing little slices of life.

Category Archives: Culture

I am a firm believer that you make your own future. Sure, doodoo occurs, but in general, the beasts you feed the most are the ones that walk with you.

To whit: I was raised in a liberal California town in mostly the 1970’s. There was something in my head that loves to doubt and be the contrarian, so by the time my socialist teachers got done with me, I realized they were mostly just greedy haters who wanted what they wanted and if others were forced to pay for it, so much the better. I now view liberalism and socialism as mental illnesses, but is it too late for me?

You see, you act, desire, fear, and hate based on your beliefs. What you think affects your disposition. Furthermore, your view of life is built on a foundation of your deepest beliefs. It’s like a house of cards, or as one wise man put it, it’s building a house on the sand.

For instance, when I was a young lad in Catholic school, I was taught that the highest ideal was Christ, who sacrificed himself for others. This is the perfect way we all should strive to live. That’s a foundational concept and a grievous misinterpretation and error. You see, when you tell a 6 year-old that, it means this: You must throw your own life away for anyone else on the planet that may require it. This leads to the next brick in this tilted wall: You must always regard your life, your existence as the most worthless thing on the planet. This leads to an overall nihilism, and the notion that you are just worthless.

My little soul cried out, I don’t want to be meaningless. I want to matter! But the foundation was poured, and had hardened. It led to another egregious error: depression and hedonism. If you are meaningless, to Hell with it: just have as much fun as you can.

When it came to the concept of work, well, what is work? The expending of decades of massive energy to acquire skill, learn the ropes, become excellent. But why would a worthless lump care about doing any of that? Especially when coupled with the liberal notion that the evil corporations will just co-opt your success and steal all the rewards, or the conservative notion that the evil government will just tax you and steal from you and ruin you if you don’t hand the rewards over to them.

Politics

You see, modern day politics is 100% designed to create a false dichotomy that you are a helpless victim because of them, and only the transfer of power to us will help with that. This is why conservatives promise tax cuts and deregulation they never deliver, while liberals promise handouts and free goodies that they never deliver.

If they ever did deliver, we’d be up a creek because then we’d have no excuse why we are not as successful as we’d like. It would be our responsibility that we fail! We can’t have that! We don’t really want that! We want there to be a reason why we can’t succeed, because we think we are worthless failures anyway, and we are loathe to blame ourselves.

It’s all a game to them, they get your votes, and it’s another 2, 4, or 8 years until they need to fool you again. Try calling your senator sometime. You’ll leave a voicemail with a million other people, but since you aren’t a million dollar donor, and they don’t need you right now, you’ll never even get a response.

But the bottom line is this: BOTH SIDES need you to feel victimized by the other side. That makes for a lot of people feeling like perpetual victims. And it’s the ones who care about society and are trying to be politically informed. I am saying that any casual involvement in politics is harmful. It’s all lies and misrepresentations designed to make you so hopeless and hateful that you panic.

The word work.

So you turn 17, and you need a job to pay for not starving, so you work. But you don’t view work as the ultimate expression of your individuality, creativity, and industry, to you it’s that bullshit society makes you do in exchange for not letting you die. Because you view yourself as worthless, you feel like you’re exchanging your second-rate efforts for a deservedly low salary. But you do as little as possible, in an effort to make it feel more fair. Eventually you have a goal of working as little as you can for as much pay as you can, all the while hoping that no one will really take a look at what you accomplish in a day. This leads you to despise your managers and coworkers because any halfway involved manager would see through your shit and reprimand you daily. You actually wish they would, because you see that you’re not growing or improving, you’re only becoming more savvy at hiding your inadequacies.

Once I loved photography. And that was back in the film days where you had to take the film to Fotomat and wait a week to get them back. I took photography classes, and took long drives to get pictures to add to my portfolio. But then I got hired to do a photo spread for a local business. I was initially jazzed. My mind started thinking, hey, maybe we can parlay this into a career! But the minute I attached the word work to it, it became a drudgery, and I barely made my deadline because I – for some reason – hated doing it, even though I loved photography. You see the inter-twisted hoops my mind went through?

Video Games

Video games are where truly hopeless minds go to find an ordered world where their lives matter. I may be worthless in real life, but I matter as a Jedi Knight. I can see the evil and actually fight it. Sometimes I even win! And there are others – lots and lots of others – who will join me in the fight. My soul is fed, and for a moment (and by moment I mean 60 hours a week) – in this preferable universe far, far away – I matter. My actions and heroism push back the borders of darkness and I actually matter.

Of course time spent in this illusion deducts from time in the real world, where we are meant to be cooperating with real people against real darkness, and attaining some measure of real greatness. Many gamers, after decades of pissing their time into the internet, find that the real world has got along fine without them.

If you started gaming at age 17 and now you’re 40, you find that you interact in the real world like a 17 year old because you missed out on all the growth that would have occurred if you had been part of society.

The Reality Stack

So your reality stack ends up looking like this.

The highest goal is to toss your life away.

You are worth less than every other person on Earth (and the few in space).

Your highest goal is to become nothing without starving.

You are convinced that they want to take everything from you.

You are perpetually hopeless, helpless, a victim.

You know your opinions are wrong and don’t matter.

Except that it’s not true.

First, let’s go back to Christ. Christ didn’t model the act of throwing His life away to show us how to throw our lives away. He did it instead of us having to do it. Christ didn’t get crucified because you are worthless and needed to be shown how to die for others. He did it because you are valuable, and He wanted to save you.

Get it? The Omnipotent Creator thinks YOU are VALUABLE. Supremely valuable. You were not meant to toss your life away and constantly defer to others, you actually have a place in life. Your energy, drive and industry have meaning and this world misses them when you withhold them. You are here for a reason.

Now we see the true roots of evil. The Bible calls the Devil “the Father of Lies”, and “The Accuser of the Brethren”. I see him not as a powerful fire demon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but more as Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. He hovers around whispering in your ear about how worthless and inadequate you are,how scary the world is, and how no one truly loves you.

Seemingly his goal is not to get us to do evil, but rather not to act at all in the face of evil. Video gamers who should have been designing Mars cities and writing great literature and solving the air and water problems are fooled into withdrawing their efforts from the family of man and pissing them away into the internet or just refusing to develop themselves because of their own hopelessness. Great thinkers who could be pursuing marvels that mankind only dreams of are instead wasting their talents fighting idiotic things like microaggressions (an aggression so small it can’t be noticed) and male privilege (the notion that men holding doors for women, fighting to give them votes, going to war for them and protecting them constitutes oppression). How many people have been born, raised and died fighting their whole lives because of some offense that occurred in the far reaches or history? What could those minds have accomplished if they were set on bettering mankind instead of feeding a 10,000 year old grudge?

So come to the truth:

You are so valuable that God sent Christ to suffer instead of you.

You are meant to be part of the answer, not the problem.

You can fight against evil and make the world a better place.

There is hope if you know where to look.

You don’t fight evil by punching it in the face: you fight evil by doing good.

You have a place in the family of man, and what you do matters to everyone, even into the future.

The Family of Man is one family. It survives or dies as one.

Once you embrace truth, you have a hard but necessary road to walk. You must unlearn all that crap you believed since you were 6. That means that the barriers in your mind – all of them – need to be re-evaluated. Those things you feel trapped about: the business idea, the love you seek, conquering porn, drug, alcohol and video game addictions, and everything – you are probably not as trapped as you think. You have to tear down the wall brick by brick and figure out if the lies that have kept you trapped really have you trapped at all.

It is for freedom’s sake that you have been set free. Don’t let yourself be put back in shackles again.

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I was thinking about sex robots, and after a prudish giggle I thought why sex robots? Well maybe this goes hand-in-metal gripper with the notion of things that humans are too expensive for. The Cotton Gin and McCormick Reaper happened because innovation was cheaper than paying people. This is 100% the reason why humans make robots.

It’s way less expensive to send an SUV into space than Elon Musk.

It’s too expensive to hire all the bank tellers people require to do all the transactions people want. Think of all your auto-deposits, ATMs, credit and debit card purchases, and online bank transactions.

It’s cheaper and more accurate to put satellites into space than it is to hire weathermen everywhere (and have spies everywhere).

So someone somewhere decided that wives, girlfriends, and prostitutes were too expensive and unreliable. Hence the sex robot. Oh stop with the indignation girls, your toys are the same thing, and you’ve had them forever.

What makes workers too expensive for their jobs? Think about the industries that have been automated.

Farming

Auto Manufacturing

Textiles

Mining

Roadwork

These are all very unionized fields. And it stands to reason. When a union comes in, you have to

pay people more,

give them more sick and vacation time,

you can’t fire them,

you have to pay their pensions forever, even if they put virtually nothing into it,

you can never reduce pay or benefits.

Even if your industry is tanking, you can’t cut back on any of these when you are dealing with a union. Even if you went to your workers and told them it’s either take a 10% pay cut or take a 100% job loss. In fact they’d probably riot if you told them they aren’t getting a cost-of-living raise every year.

I am from the San Francisco Bay Area. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). When BART was designed back in 1972, it was completely possible to automate the whole thing. Driverless trains, Automated ticket sales, computerized turnstiles controlled from central computers. But the Transit Unions sued the system to make them require that a train operator be on every single train. They had to redesign the nose cone on the trains and put in a room with a mirror and like 2 buttons and a seat. And the cost-savings of automation went out the (unopenable) windows.

Furthermore, BART was prevented initially from running all the way to San Francisco Airport because the Cab Drivers Unions forbade it. They rightly felt that their low quality, overpriced service would take a major hit. Even today with BART 90% of the way to the airport, you still need that 10 minute bus ride from the station.

So I posit that there is a causal relationship between unions and robots (and mechanization in general). I also posit that automation may not always make the world better, but unions always make things lower quality and more expensive. This is exactly what makes automation more affordable than them. You did this to yourselves.

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Discrimination is a good thing. It’s what makes us say things like this is a good use of my time, or this is a waste of my time. It allows us to say this person is worth spending my time and energy , but this other person is not worth my time. Discrimination used to indicate that a person has refined tastes. That guy has a discriminating palette with regard to fine wines and foods. That woman is a discriminating judge of character.

Discrimination is why you eat cheese and you don’t eat poo.

A discriminating person is a superior person. You wouldn’t ask a bum for investment advice, nor would you ask an actor how to solve sociopolitical problems. You’d go to someone with superior knowledge of the subject.

Discrimination is what you do when you get married (or even when you decide not to). You are saying to 11.8 billion people, I choose this one person to love, honor and cherish above all others.

In my life, I like to discriminate against charlatans and idiots. Some idiots like to discriminate against people because of their skin or hair color. Have you ever heard a woman say, I would never date anyone shorter than me? I have.

My point is that the word discrimination simply means the ability to choose wisely between different things, like Best Foods mayo over Miracle Whip.

Right now, idiots like to say that white males are discriminating against all others simply by being white males. White males are to be shouted down, hit, run out of town, fired from their jobs, stripped of their rightful earnings, and made unemployable by virtue of the skin tone of their penis.

In a free world, Nathan Bedford Forrest can open a Whites Only restaurant. I wouldn’t go there, and I think he’s idiotically cutting off a big chunk of income, but I also don’t think he should be forced by men with guns to change his restaurant. Likewise, if Bobby Seale and Huey Newton want to open a Blacks Only restaurant I would never go there either, and I think it’s an equally stupid move, but I still don’t want men with guns to come change it.

I would celebrate the day either of these businesses failed. But I would not want my tax dollars to force them to do what they truly believe is wrong. I hate the idea of these people being so stupid, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my freedom, autonomy, and personal sovereignty in order to make them stop.

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Your boss eventually agrees, and raises his prices to give you a raise.

All the other bosses at all the other companies do the same.

You take your 10% raise and find everything at the store costs 10% more.

You have not gotten any benefit from your raise.

…

You sit down with your boss and ask him how you can get ahead.

Improving efficiency. Make 5 widgets for every one you made before. That way, prices hold or fall, and wages stay steady.

So the real way to increase quality of life is to increase worker productivity.

…

Enter the labor union.

What do labor unions do? The stated stuff, not the corrupt stuff.

They fight for increasing wages

They fight a boss’s ability to fire unproductive workers

They fight to increase paid time off

More holidays

More vacation

Maternity/Paternity leave

They fight for endless medical and retirement plans, sometimes more than the worker has contributed to their plan

They make it so the union gets to decide who gets jobs, and no worker may be brought in on his own contract

All these things directly impact productivity. That leads to increasing prices without increasing quality.

Union workers like to imagine that their higher wages make them wealthier, but that assumes all other companies are not raising wages and prices. There was an ad years ago that said, In 1900, a $20 gold piece would buy you a really nice suit. Today, a $20 gold piece is worth about $1300. The gold piece will still buy you a great suit, but your $20 bill won’t pay for the alterations.

If you really want to become more wealthy (real wealth), then figure out how to do your job better, faster, more efficiently.

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MIlo Yiannopoulos was un-vited from speaking at CPAC, lost his book deal, and forced to quit his job at Breitbart News.

What was his crime?

It was speaking on a podcast a year ago in such a way that when heavily edited, seemed like he supported pedophilia.

None of this is true – Milo detests pedophiles, but the damage is done, the left has won.

I have never understood this. People can devote their love and energy to a cause or job for decades, but commit one wrong move (or in Milo’s case only appear to have committed a wrong move) and that’s it. You’ll never work again.

There was a time when I offended someone at work. I was notified by management that I had done something to offend someone.

“Wow. I had no idea. Who was it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Well then what did I do or say?”

“You should know that.”

“I don’t.”

Look, I am a christian, and was at the time a republican, but pretty quiet about those things in the workplace. But given the number of times when a public person lost everything for an off-color comment in a bar, I wanted to go and smooth things over with whoever complained, and make peace. I have a family, and my job was important to me.

But they didn’t want peace. They wanted me to shut up and work. They wanted me to live in fear that something I might say to someone might get me fired and blacklisted in my industry. Furthermore, when politics or religion came up they wanted me to quietly listen as my side was bashed and ridiculed.

This had the expected result. I now couldn’t be sure who was so small that they had taken a trivial comment to management. I stopped going to lunch with everyone. I never chatted about anything non-task-related with anyone. I became a miserable old hermit in my dark little cube. I also sold all my company stock options. That was my little dig at them.

There is no cure for this sickness. There is no way to fight a nameless, faceless hatred that refuses to stand up and face us like real people. I weep for western culture.

To all my current and future coworkers: I vow that if I am offended by anything you do or say, I will respond in one of two ways.

I will talk to you face to face about it.

I will let it slide, though I may seethe for a little while about it.

I will never, ever go to management to anonymously shut you down and possibly get you fired though. That’s just cowardly.